Ubuntu Kiosk

This post is a work in progress. I’ll update it as I tweak the solution.

Last Wednesday I was helping a friend build a Kiosk. We tried to follow https://thepcspy.com/read/building-a-kiosk-computer-ubuntu-1404-chrome/ but it didn’t work. It turns out between using the wrong version of ubuntu (16.04 instead of 14.04) and doing it in a virtual machine, we were all messed up.

There has to be a better way.

There is a secret to debian/ubuntu packages. If you aren’t trying to get them included in debian/ubuntu, you can break most of the rules and get them to do whatever you want. I figured I should be able to use this and make creating a kiosk as easy as apt install kiosk

TL;DR: you can try this by running these two commands on a new ubuntu-server installation:

To test the deb, I copy it to a fresh ubuntu server install and dpkg -i to install it. I get a bunch of errors because dpkg -i doesn’t resolve dependencies, but I run apt install -f and the dependencies are installed.

Once I tested and tweaked and got things working, I updated the tarball `tar -Jcf ../kioskme_0.0.0-0.orig.tar.xz -C .. –exclude=’debian’ kioskme` and I used dpkg-buildpackage -S to build a source package and then I used dput ppa:evarlast/kiosk ../kioskme_0.0.0-1_source.changes to upload to PPA.

Now, this still does not work in a VM. Ubuntu desktop installer must do some magic to make X work in a virtual machine with a driver which works with VMWare, VirtualBox, or Parallels.